The Starting Rotation: Better or Worst for Pirates, Orioles?

Get your weekend off on the right foot with an eclectic look around the major leagues from Pat Lackey and Andrew Johnson in The Starting Rotation.

The Ace: Racing for No. 1

Andrew Johnson: There's comfort and familiarity in this year's "race" for the No. 1 draft pick. None of this Cincinnati-San Diego-Texas upstart business like we are seeing on the other end of the spectrum. The Baltimore Orioles have been losers since the Clinton Administration. The Pittsburgh Pirates as I, you, we are constantly reminded have been the same since the days of Bush I.

You as a Pittsburgh expatriate and I as a Maryland denizen have watched these teams/trainwrecks up close and personal over the last few years, making us uniquely, and perhaps unfortunately, qualified to answer the following question.

Who needs that No. 1 pick more?

The Pirates have a five-game lead in the race at the moment and have been positively abysmal for quite some time. The Orioles were in '03 Detroit Tigers territory for a long stretch before Buck Showalter came in and, superficially at least, tightened things up. That doesn't really tell us everything we need to know to answer the question. Fire away.

Pat Lackey: Well it's not easy to say needs the top pick more. If Anthony Rendon recovers from his ankle injury just about every team in baseball could use a kid who's being described as a Ryan Zimmerman/Evan Longoria-type prospect after a ridiculous sophomore year at Rice when he hit .394/.530/.801 (that's a 1.331 OPS) with 26 homers in 63 games.

That said, the Pirates are really bad this year and I can think of 100 different ways to say it. They're 44-89, but their Pythagorean record is actually worse (40-93) because they've been outscored by 263 runs this year. That puts them on pace for minus-320 on the season, one of the worst marks in the history of baseball. They're even worse on the road at 14-53. They have five starters with 10 or more losses. They're 23-58 since June 1. There's a lot of very serious speculation right now that this is the worst club in modern franchise history and that's not a statement to be taken lightly. In addition to the 18-year losing streak they're on right now, they lost 104 games in 1985 and had three straight 100-loss seasons from 1952-1954 (remember, they only played 154 game seasons then), including a 112-loss campaign in 1952.

AJ: So, I have to argue against the worst Pirates team, possibly ever? No sense wasting time, then, in pulling out my trump card. Unsurprisingly, it involves the positions of these two teams in the baseball landscape. More directly, I mean the Orioles' Sisyphian fate of playing the AL East year after year after year.

When Dave Trembley was shown the door in early June, Baltimore was on pace to lose 117 games. Now, with Showalter at the helm, it might be lucky enough to avoid 100 losses altogether. I love what Showalter brings to the O's, but Buck's reputation for turning young ballclubs into winning ballclubs isn't enough in this division.

The Orioles have some nice pieces -- Adam Jones, Matt Wieters, Brian Matusz, Nick Markakis -- pieces that can help win games right now, which is more than we can say for most of the Pirates' roster. But Baltimore needs more big chips than Pittsburgh just to sit at the high-stakes AL East table.

You don't need to do much arguing to convince me that the Pirates are worse, perhaps significantly worse, than the Orioles at baseball. But, especially given how they have spent in the draft, the Bucs are probably closer, perhaps significantly closer, to truly contending. And that's really what this is all about right?

PL: I do think the Pirates are in better shape than people probably realize. The four young players that currently make up the core in Pittsburgh -- Andrew McCutchen, Pedro Alvarez, Jose Tabata, and Neil Walker -- are maybe more talented than any group of young players the Pirates have had since the late '80s. McCutchen and Alvarez have been streaky this year and that's part of the reason the club hasn't scored runs, but Tabata and Walker have both raised their stock quite a bit this year with very strong performances in Pittsburgh. If you add Rendon to that group and give them a couple years to marinate ... well, it's too early to say any thing for sure, but it sure seems today like that'd be a solid core.

I'm not as sold on the pitching, though. They spent a ton of money on high schoolers Jameson Taillon and Stetson Allie and on 16-year old Mexican Luis Heredia, but it's possible that only Taillon will be ready in time to really get a chance to pitch with the group that's in Pittsburgh now. There's some decent pitching talent at the Double-A level but certainly no top-level prospects there. Perhaps it'll be enough to get them into contention if Ross Ohlendorf and James McDonald become solid major leaguers, but the Pirates still have a lot of work to do to fill in the edges around Alvarez, McCutchen, Tabata, and Walker before it's time to talk about that.

On the whole though, I can't disagree that the division makes a huge difference. The Cardinals are already paying Matt Holliday a ton of money and they're going to have to pay even more to Albert Pujols in the near future. I'm interested to see how they hold together with so much salary tied up in two guys. The Cubs and Astros are basically adrift at sea right now (not that they're worse than the Pirates, just that I'm not sure what their plan is to get better), the Brewers might be facing the end of the Prince Fielder era, and the Reds have a good young club but they're still relying on some veterans (Brandon Phillips, Scott Rolen, Bronson Arroyo and a chunk of their bullpen) to push them into contention.

So then let me ask this question: in a division where a very talented Blue Jays team is almost a complete afterthought in 2010, can the Orioles ever contend? What do they have to do to get there?

AJ: To paraphrase President Obama, yes they can. It's just going to take a massive effort. You called the Blue Jays afterthoughts in this division, a fair assessment, but it's the Orioles who have been in a different class entirely from the other four teams in the AL East over the last few seasons, and the reason is simple: depth.

Every team in the AL East except Baltimore has tremendous organizational depth across the board. That's how those very same Jays were able to lose Roy Halladay and hardly miss a beat this year. The Orioles haven't had that in a long time. There just isn't much around those nice pieces I mentioned above, and that problem extends to their farm system.

Ironically, the O's could probably borrow a few tactics from the Pirates by splashing big in the draft and on the international market. It's never going to be a big free agent or two that gets them hanging with the big boys, anyway. But even if they do that, it's going to take some good fortune or some master strokes of genius to follow in the Rays' footsteps.

I'm a big fan of what Andy MacPhail has done since taking over in 2007, but as good as I think he is -- and this is a guy who has World Series on his resumes -- I'm not sure he's good enough to get the Orioles over the top with all of the factors working against him. That's how tough the AL East is.

Even though the NL Central is orders of magnitude easier to conquer, I'm guessing the Pirates are still staring at some significant hurdles, even if the current regime is doing things mostly the right way. What do Neal Huntington and Frank Coonelly still need to do better?

PL: The most important thing for the Pirates to do is to keep drafting the way they have the last three seasons. Three good drafts and a couple nice trades have left them with a good young core in Pittsburgh and a lot of talent from Double-A down, but it's not hard to see that that isn't enough yet. Coonelly has said in the past that the goal is to raise their payroll up around the $70-$80 million mark, but that can't come at the expense of the draft or international talent budget.

Pirates fans don't like to hear things like this, but even with the payroll in that range they won't be able to keep players like McCutchen or Alvarez for their whole careers. Unless they want to see the window they're trying to open for 2012 close up by 2014 or so, they have to flood the system with new talent every single year, first to fill out the team they're trying to build in Pittsburgh and then to restock it once players hit free agency.

No. 2 Starter: From Tony Plush to Mr. Hyde

What in the world is going on with Nyjer Morgan? A little over a year ago, Pirates fans were up in arms that the club traded Morgan for chronic underachiever Lastings Milledge, not because Morgan was a substantially better player, but because Morgan had established himself as a major league character.

Much of that stemmed from a now-legendary interview he did with Rocco DeMaro where he joked about anything and everything, finally referring to himself by his "gentleman's name," Tony Plush. Even as recently as this June, when he was struggling with the Nats, Pirates fans missed him simply for his presence. Not only was he funny and willing to talk to anyone about anything, but his past as a hockey player endeared him to hockey-mad Pittsburgh.

D.C.'s not such a bad hockey town itself, though, and after a few months with the Nats it seemed like he was a big hit in his new home. It's obvious from this profile done by the Washington Post's Dan Steinberg that the fans and players alike ate the Tony Plush alter-ego up, perhaps partially because Morgan hit .351 and made some highlight-reel catches in his 49 games with Washington before a season-ending injury. No one was sure he'd be able to hit .351 again in 2010, but it sure seemed like a safe bet that Nyjer Morgan was the type of player that fans like to root for, no matter how well he plays.

Suddenly, though, Tony Plush has become more Mr. Hyde than anything else. In May, Morgan misplayed an Adam Jones fly ball and instead of chasing after it, threw his glove down in frustration while Jones circled the bases for an inside-the-park homer. Last week, he was suspended for seven games after throwing the ball into the stands in the middle of an inning and hitting a fan at Citizens Bank Park, a decision he is currently appealing. Over the weekend, he steamrolled Cardinals catcher Bryan Anderson in a way that upset his own manager, Jim Riggleman. Wednesday night, he charged the mound after Chris Volstad threw behind him in the sixth inning (Volstad also hit him with a pitch in the fourth) and touched off a huge brawl between the Nationals and Marlins.

After all of his shenanigans, now Pirate fans are saying things like, "Every day I grow more and more glad the Pirates got rid of this guy." Nats fans don't feel much different. In a post titled "Nyjer Morgan Must Go," Will Yoder of The Nats Blog calls Morgan's behavior "embarrassing" and says, "This franchise is trying to turn itself around from the inside out. They can't do it with gaping distractions like Nyjer on the field. ... He has taken the last several weeks hostage for the Nationals, it's time that we start to look in another direction."

The Washington Post's Adam Kilgore referred to Morgan's ugly week as a "heel-turn," and given Morgan's seeming awareness of how he's perceived (check the DeMaro interview or the Steinberg profile linked above if you haven't yet) maybe that's an accurate way to describe this past week. Everyone loves to hate a few players (think about how Manny Ramirez's ridiculous press conference with a translator in Cleveland this week was received), so why has Morgan's turn been so poorly received?

Maybe because it does seem out of character. Maybe because the perception is that he's lashing out due to frustration with his ugly .257/.317/.318 line. Or maybe it's because players that hit the way Morgan has this year don't get the benefit of the doubt. He'll have some time to think about all of this, though, because he's got a seven-game suspension on his head after the ball-throwing incident and the league is sure to give him a few extra games after the incident with Volstad.

Back-End Filler

• Check your rational thought at the door, and assume for a second that the Red Sox were in fact under the spell of the Curse of the Bambino for eightysome years. If you're willing to go that far down the rabbit hole, then ask yourself when the Curse was broken. Dave Roberts' steal, Curt Schilling's bloody sock or Edgar Renteria's tapper back to Keith Foulke might be popular answers, but given what we're witnessing in Los Angeles this week, I'm thinking the hex was lifted years earlier.

Remember -- never forget, Red Sox fans -- that Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, the guy who has leveraged his team to fund a lavish personal life, burying it in massive debt and severely restricting payroll, came very close to purchasing the Olde Towne Team when they were for sale back in 2002. McCourt was planning to build a new ballpark in South Boston, but, "another door opened and it was the Dodgers," he told the Boston Globe back in 2004. Boston's baseball fortunes didn't begin to turn late in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS. They did a U-turn two years prior, when John Henry's group beat out McCourt.

• Now that the Padres are on a seven-game losing streak, Friar fans all over Southern California are hitting the panic button. Once neck and neck with the Yankees for baseball's best record, they're now the third-best team in the National League behind the Reds and Braves. And their division lead is down to three games! How can a team playing so poorly so late in the year bounce back?

Pads' fans should be worried, but it's not time to abandon ship yet. Remember the 2006 Cardinals? On Sept. 19, they were sitting pretty at 80-69, the second-best record in the National League, with a seven-game lead on the Reds and 8 1/2 games on the Astros. They dropped their next seven games and eight of their next nine and suddenly on Sept. 28, they were just a half-game up on the 'Stros. They managed to close out the division with two wins in their last three games and from there went on to win the World Series.

So yes, the Padres look awful right now and the Giants are looming in their rear-view mirror. But they're hosting Colorado this weekend and a strong series could bury the Rockies for good (they're currently 7 1/2 games back) and have the Padres right back on track. This losing streak might seem a million miles away on Monday. And even if they play poorly, remember that the Cardinals swept the Reds three weeks ago to take a one-game lead in the NL Central. Those two clubs are meeting again this weekend with the Reds eight games clear.

• If Carlos Gonzalez's numbers on the road become the Achilles' heel in his dark-horse MVP campaign, then the reverse should be true for Reds first baseman Joey Votto. Gonzalez's dramatic splits -- a .386 average, 23 home runs and a 1.212 OPS at home vs. a .275 average, .733 OPS and seven home runs on the road -- are a major point against the right fielder because all that production has come at notoriously hitter-friendly Coors Field.

Votto also plays in a hitter-friendly park -- Great American Ball Park -- but his numbers are actually better on the road. Votto is hitting .345 away from Cincinnati as opposed to .305 at home, he has 16 homers apiece on the road and at home, and his 1.079 OPS away from GABP is 107 points higher than it is in Cincinnati.